AE/Media Encoder: The best Workstation Configuration

[Todd Kopriva]

See this page for information about hardware for After Effects (and Premiere Pro and Photoshop): https://adobe.ly/pRYOuk

If you’re just concerned about After Effects, then CPU, RAM, and fast disks/buses are all more important that a high-end GPU.

Regarding OpenGL: The OpenGL renderer in After Effects CS5.5 was garbage. We threw it out for After Effects CS6.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Walter Soyka]

[Andy Kreutzberg] “Hope you guys can point me to articles, give some advice or even recommend your own setups. Apologies if this question has been asked a dozen times before. But it would be nice to get some perspective on recent developments in this.”

There’s a lot of great information in the link that Todd posted.

If you do Ae full-time, I recommend the highest-spec, best-balanced workstation you can afford.

Balance is all about purchasing intelligently so you don’t build a resource-wasting bottleneck into your system. For example, a 16-core workstation with only 24 GB of RAM would be very unbalanced: your CPUs would sit idle most of the time because they wouldn’t have enough RAM to work in. A 16-core workstation with 64 GB of RAM and only a single hard disk may become disk-bound, unable to read or write to the hard disk as fast as the rest of the system can work, wasting CPU and RAM.

I recommend buying a workstation with the fastest and most CPUs you can afford, with 4 GB of RAM per core, one hard drive for the OS (possibly SSD), a dedicated SSD for Ae’s new disk cache, and a fast disk or RAID system for media.

If you are interested in CS6’s new ray-tracing renderer, I do recommend buying an NVIDIA card — but no need for Quadro, a decent GTX card will do. There are a few other effects that can also exploit the GPU (GenArts Sapphire uses CUDA specifically, other effects like Element, ShapeShifter, MB Colorista/Looks can use any decent modern OpenGL card).

For a specific recommendation based on my own setup — I was a long-time Mac user, but HP provided me a Z800 for evaluation a while back, and I’ve been so happy with it that I’ve since bought additional HP systems for daily use alongside my Macs.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Andy Kreutzberg] “Does a super-expensive quadro or tesla system actually make sense for AE and Media Encoder or is that just a waste of money because the programs don’t make use of the card(s)?”

They do make use of the cards (in certain tasks – follow Todd’s links for more info) – however purely on BFTB ratio GeForce cards win (GTX-660 Ti, 670, etc.). In other words, no need to get Teslas or Quadros for CS purposes.

i7 systems wins on BFTB as well, over Xeon-based ones. It’s when you’re hitting the performance ceiling, memory and PCIe lanes limitations inherent with i7, and/or need enterprise class support, you’d want to consider Xeon-based single or dual socket systems, be it DIY, customs (Boxx, Promax) or Tier 1 (HP, Dell).

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[Jordan Westhoff]

I would prize CPU power and your disk speed above all else. These two factors are the most critical in power rendering with After Effects or Premiere

-Jordan Westhoff

Rochester Institute of Technology
BS Digital Cinema/Motion Picture Science 2015

[Walter Soyka]

[Jordan Westhoff] “I would prize CPU power and your disk speed above all else. These two factors are the most critical in power rendering with After Effects or Premiere”

And RAM. If you don’t have enough RAM, you can’t make effective use of the CPUs.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Walter Soyka] “And RAM”

It shall be cheap RAM at that, please, if I could add my wish to the pile. (Thanks heavens we moved away from FB and Rambus memory, or we’d still think 4GB was plenty, and there’d be no SSDs.)

[Bill Lake]

Ae previews footage fastest when you have fast I/o (buss and disks) so put source media on raid zero. Never use caviar disks – you need fast disks with fast seek/read times.
Ae previews of effects requires fast CPU, large/balanced memory (2g per core min)
Never render from ae. Use AME.
Ame uses cuda to dramatically increase render speed. It also has better encoders. For this you must use an nvidia you. The more cores the better. This really only impacts renders.
Disk setup is critical: read source media from raid zero. Render to separate disk raid zero, apps/ O’s on dedicated drive, as well. Then read up on where to place page file, caches, etc. Hsrm Millard is an expert on this.

[Walter Soyka]

[Bill Lake] “Never render from ae. Use AME. Ame uses cuda to dramatically increase render speed. It also has better encoders. For this you must use an nvidia you. The more cores the better. This really only impacts renders.”

AME does not render Ae comps faster than Ae does. It actually calls a background Ae process to render the frames. The CUDA acceleration in AME does not accelerate the actual rendering of an Ae frame (though I suppose it may accelerate scaling of frames, post-render,depending on compression settings)

AME can in fact render Ae comps more slowly than Ae does, because it cannot exploit multiprocessing.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Todd Kopriva]

AME is faster at the encoding phase; the main (“headed”) After Effects is faster at the rendering phase.

That’s why I render a losslessly encoded master from After Effects to an AME watch folder and use AME to grab those master files and transcode them into various compressed delivery formats.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Bill Lake]

I thought I read (somewhere) that when you render a comp from AME, it called AE in the background, and AE rendered the frames, and then AME did final encoding. If AE is called, then why wouldn’t AE use it’s typical resourcing (i.e. multi-thread) to render?
-Bill